In Flight OMAKE: The Adventures of Yuukichan!
by Syroc
Summary: Yet another outrigger series of stories based on Gabriel Blessing's story 'In Flight'. So very, very meta.
1. Chapter 1

**The Adventures of Yuuki-chan: The Unluckiest Sekirei!**

**Episode 1: A New Challenger Appears!**

It was another rooftop battle, just like that fateful day that had led to the winging of Tsukiumi. This time, however, only the aforementioned water-user and Musubi were fighting. Shirou and the rest of his flock had already gone ahead to rescue Uzume from whatever silliness the narrator has yet to be told of. They were fighting a pair of sekirei, which was handy since it allowed them both to adhere to the rules of the Sekirei plan.

"Sekirei number 88, Musubi!" The bountifully breasted sekirei pronounced proudly, and moved seamlessly into a battle stance.

Her opponent was a petit young-looking woman with dark red hair, wearing what looked like a jogging outfit that had seen much better days (there were gaping holes and tears all around it, as well as what looked like dark stains that still hadn't faded) with a pair nunchaku in her hands. She gave her ashikabi, a foreign-looking young man who was expensively dressed, a questioning look. A quick nod was her response, to which the sekirei let out a long-suffering sigh.

"Number 23, Yuuki." The newly named Yuuki answered with some trepidation, and she gave her weapons a half-hearted twirl before sinking into a stance herself.

"Do me proud, Yuuki!" The foreign-looking Ashikabi cheered on from the sideline, pumping a fist into the air. "If you do well, you might level up into a more powerful fighter!"

"Ahh!" Musubi shouted out at the other ashikabi's pronouncement. "We can level up? I didn't know we could do that! I'm gonna take one in 'badass'!"

"Don't be stupid, Musubi." Tsukiumi scolded from her own battle with another, much less plot-relevant opponent. "Just beat her so we can join Shirou!"

"Ah! You're right!" The shrine-maiden exclaimed, and then pointed an accusing finger at her own opponent. "I need to defeat you and prove the power of love to Shirou-san!"

Yuuki merely stood impassively, waiting for everyone to shut up so the fight could begin.

And when it did, she was treated to a textbook display of 'complete and utter *ss-kicking'. Number 23 managed to make a single swipe with her nunchaku, a blow that Musubi easily dodged and then kept going to strike her solidly in her own side. After that a rain of blows ensued that rendered the shabbily-dressed sekirei to groaning mass on the ground. Anyone watching would have been unable to feel anything other than sympathy towards the badly beaten Sekirei, a feeling that Musubi fortunately was too busy being excited to experience.

She was about to place her hand on her opponent's crest and end the fight when the strange ashikabi gave out a cry and rushed to his Sekirei's side, cradling her ruined body to him.

"Master..." The badly wounded sekirei gasped out painfully.

The foreign-looking man rose to his feet, holding the woman bridal style in his arms.

"Don't worry, Yuuki!" The man assured her desperately. "I'll make you better!"

"..'nk you..." She muttered pitifully.

The two of them began to retreat, and the only thing missing was setting sun in the background for it to have been a perfect.

Musubi was so touched by the scene she had just witnessed that she didn't have the heart to tear the two apart. Love was much more important that just winning a fight, after all. And it wasn't like they were a threat anymore, so she could just-

Her line of thought in horrified wonder as that very same ashikabi casually tossed his sekirei off the building. Her opponent had just time enough to squawk indignantly before she disappeared over the edge. A moment later they all heard a distant, fleshy 'thwump' as the body impacted.

Everyone who was watching was by now staring at the foreign young man, who gave them an affronted look.

"What?" He asked, sounding genuinely curious to find out what everyone found so odd about throwing his own sekirei to her death.

"What did you do?" Musubi shouted, her eyes wide with horror. "You killed her!"

The foreign ashikabi gave a radiant smile and a thumbs up.

"Yup! Don't worry, she'll be right as rain soon enough!"

"Idiot!" Musubi shrieked. "Everyone knows things that die stay dead!"

And a moment later that statement was proven wrong as, implausibly as it seemed, Yuuki leaped back up unto the rooftop, wearing an annoyed look on her face.

"That wasn't necessary." She said reproachfully to her ashikabi.

Musubi shifted her horrified look to one of terror, pointing an accusing finger at the sudden arrival of her.

"G-g-g-g-" She began stuttering out, staggering backwards as she did.

"Ah, Yuuki!" The young man said, grinning widely. "I love watching people react to you!"

"Ghost!" Musubi finally shouted out. "Tsukiumi-san, help me! I can't fight a dead person!"

"I'm not dead, you idiot!" Yuuki snarled out.

"We saw you fall! We heard you hit the ground!" Tsukiumi's opponent pointed out, and everyone else nodded in agreement.

"So? I just regenerated. No harm done."

"You _died_!"

"Bah, trifles."

"He threw you off the roof!"

"Not the way I'd have preferred things to be done, but it did the trick I guess."

"_You died_!"

"It didn't stick."

Tsukiumi seemed to have had enough tomfoolery with the amazing dying Sekirei.

"Musubi!" the blonde said imperiously. "Just finish her off! Shirou needs our help!"

The shrine maiden glared suspiciously at her opponent, her hands held closely too her body as she warily studied the woman.

"You're not going to eat my brain, are you?" She eventually asked, eyeing the redhead distrustfully.

"I'm not a zombie!" Yuuki protested hotly. "Look, do you see me groaning or shambling around? Do I-"

The refute was apparently all that Musubi needed to convince her to reopen the can-o'-whoop-*ss she'd previously unleashed upon her enemy.

Once more, number 23 was beaten to the last inch of life. This time she put up a bit more of a fight, but against Musubi's merciless ministrations there could be no victory. It was not long before Yuuki was again lying in a broken heap, utterly defeated. She lay near the edge of the building, gasping for breath.

And again her ashikabi pushed her over the edge, this time prodding her over with his foot rather than throwing her over.

Musubi gaped at the young man openly, before pointing at him once more.

"Stop killing your sekirei!" She shouted at him indignantly. "Don't you love her?"

"Of course!" He answered brightly. "And that's why I won't let you beat her! She must triumph!"

"Ahh!" A shriek from below sounded out, which seemed to cause the foreigner to blanch and rush over to the edge. "Damien, help me! I'm being attacked by raccoons! Save me!"

The foreigner gasped, and hurriedly retreated in order to rescue his sekirei from the vicious assault from murderous rodents.

Musubi continued to stare at the quickly disappearing ashikabi, before eventually she pushed the whole affair out of her mind. This really was too weird even for her.

"Tsukiumi-san, I'm off to save Shirou!" She called out, already fixed on her new task.


	2. Chapter 2

**The Adventures of Yuuki-Chan: The Unluckiest Sekirei!**

**Episode 2: Yuuki-chan And The Black Sekirei! A Secret Unveiled?**

"Tell me again why we have to fight her, master."

The question was asked by everyone's favourite walking paradox, Yuuki. (Who possessed the unique and incredible ability to die repeatedly and somehow survive the ordeal.) She was once again getting ready for battle at the behest of her master, the ever-optimistic (and often disappointed) Damien Trask.

"Because when you defeat her everyone'll know just how powerful you are!"

"But my power _sucks_, master!" Yuuki whined piteously. "And those raccoons stole my nunchaku!"

This wasn't strictly true. Yuuki had in fact cleverly hidden the weapons in the trash bins the raccoons had been lurking inside of when she had rudely fallen onto them from six stories above in a vain effort to _never_ have to fight again. It was understandable why she might do this when her standard stratagem in battle was 'let the other person kill me until the other person gets too tired to fight back'. So far it was the only tactic that had resulted in any kind of victory, and even then it was only a technical one.

"Ahh! But isn't that claymore I got you just _awesome_?" Her Ashikabi enthused happily. "Once you carve that great big poser up everyone will be _so_ impressed with you!"

"But I've never _used_ one before, master!" The sekirei protested.

"Then you'll have plenty of chances to improve! Go on, Yuuki-chan! Show that old hag who's boss!"

Said 'old hag' pursed her lips tightly at that, one of her eyebrows twitching wildly for just a moment before she reigned herself back in. After all, the only thing she had to do here was butcher the little slip of a girl. And then there would be no witnesses to say otherwise when she filed a report saying that the Ashikabi she had encountered had simply spontaneously combusted before she could apprehend him. While falling from the sidewalk at three-thousand miles per hour. Onto her sword. Repeatedly. Yes, that would do nicely...

Yuuki saw the malice burning hot in Karasuba's eyes, and did not like the way things were shaping up.

Even she, who possessed the unfortunate inability to die without being perfectly regenerated moments later, (and likewise an inability to regenerate _unless_ she died,) feared the Black Sekirei. After all, there were so many ways to _not_ kill someone. There was in fact a veritable laundry list of ways. Quite a few of them could go on for _days_.

"Uhm, I don't think that this is such a good idea, master." The unfortunate Sekirei muttered.

"_Nonsense!_" The strange man refuted, and pointed an imperious finger at the Black Sekirei. "Now go chop 'er into giblets!"

Yuuki gave one last pleading look towards her master, but when she saw only sheer determination she merely sagged in disappointed. Torture and dismemberment was the order of the day, it seemed.

With a quiet sigh of resignation, Yuuki pulled the massive claymore that her master had procured for her from her back and in held it in front of her, ready to strike...

... And promptly discovered that in spite of what anime might lead one to believe, petit young women _can't_ actually wield a weapon bigger than they are as if they were no heavier than a paper fan without intensive training and quite possibly a bit of magic in order to help things along. In fact, the moment Yuuki tried to point the weapon at her opponent she found that she simply did not have the weight to balance against the massive weapon, and promptly fell forward in a heap.

Both Karasuba and Damien watched this, the former with amusement and the latter with disappointment.

A moment later the young woman was scrabbling desperately back up, and met resistance in the form of the claymore in her hands. The thing stubbornly refused to budge from the ground.

"_What the hell is this freaking thing made out of?_" Yuuki shouted, trying in vain to lift the weapon.

Damien shook his head, 'tsk'ing lightly under his breath. He stood behind her, then bent over to help her pick the oversized weapon up from the ground. His hands overlapped hers as he helped her, and together they held the sword aloft.

"Now, try again Yuuki." The foreign man said with a warm, encouraging smile. His close proximity caused his sekirei to burst into an intense blush, which served only to make her ashikabi's smile widen.

"Oh, _spare_ me that garbage." Karasuba said with a scowl. "Just get on with it already."

Yuufi felt her Ashikabi slip away, but this time she managed to stay upright after a moment of hastily rearranging her feet to steady herself. Realizing that there was an actual chance that she might actually get the hang of using the impressively oversized weapon, Yuuki grinned fiercely and readied herself for battle...

... Only to discover once again that anime is made by a bunch of dirty liars, because there is no possible way that an untried young woman with no prior experience wielding an exotic weapon can triumph against a seasoned warrior wielding her weapon of choice.

Karasuba's katana whistled with deadly efficiency as she deftly brought it to bear against the young Sekirei to lethal effect. The claymore was blocked, twisted from her grasp and then in a complicated move that didn't seem physically possible brought back down against its former wielder to impale her just below her ribcage and pin her in an awkward bent-backwards arch that left her above the ground and completely helpless.

She cried out in agony, writhing uselessly in an effort to free herself from her deadly predicament.

The strange foreigner merely 'tsk'ed in response to this, folding his arms in disappointment. This was cause for more than a little curiosity in Karasuba, as she could count the amount of people who could calmly watch someone get viciously killed/maimed without letting it affect them at all on one hand.

"You _really_ have to get better at this, Yuuki-chan." He admonished lightly, as if she wasn't screaming in pain. "After all, that old hag isn't about to kill _herself_, now is she?"

The Black Sekirei felt her eyebrow twitch once more, unbridled fury building up for a moment before she turned into a whirlwind of movement as she got ready to demonstrate just why it was a terminally bad idea to insult malevolent aliens with a penchant for swords.

Karasuba took a small amount of pleasure as the moment her blade cut through the foreign man's neck his face went slack with surprise and shock, no doubt thinking that it was forbidden for someone to attack an Ashikabi. His face kept that look even as his head flew to side, severed clean from his shoulders.

"Master!" Yuuki cried out, and struggled in vain to free himself from her predicament as she witnessed her Ashikabi's demise despite the pain that doing so caused her.

His body stayed rigid, remaining upright even without a head to guide it. For a moment she was impressed with her own skill. Had she made such a clean, perfect cut that the man's body hadn't been disturbed? She hadn't seen even Miya manage something like that.

The moment passed, however, when the body steadfastedly refused to buckle and fall over even after a few seconds, instead staying exactly as it had.

Instead, it casually turned and loped off to where the head had landed only moments before, leaned down and carefully replaced it back on top of its shoulders. The foreign ashikabi's face wore a deep scowl even as his hands held it firmly in place.

"Y'know, I _really_ wish you hadn't done that." The foreigner admonished lightly.

Karasuba watched all of this with a perfectly perplexed expression on her face. This, she felt, was _not_ how things were supposed to happen. Usually there was a great deal more anguish. Screams were also commonplace. But someone doing live-action horsemanning without a second person? _That_ was new.

Unperturbed by his blatant defiance of the natural order, the foreigner calmly sidled up to his stricken Sekirei

"I mean, do you even _know_ how _hard_ it is to explain away stitches that go all the way around the neck?" The foreigner complained. "I'll be wearing turtlenecks for _weeks_. And I _hate_ turtlenecks."

"Master?" Yuuki asked, uncertainly.

"Be right with you, Yuuki." The foreign reassured brightly, though where a normal human might have twisted his neck to look at the person they were speaking to _this_ particular individual used his hands to move. Which made sense, since the head was still severed. "But first I have to take care of this woman. By the way, _think fast!_"

The last bit was shouted out at a rapid clip, and was followed quickly by the strange Ashikabi throwing his own head with a powerful overhand at Karasuba. The Black Sekirei had only a second to react, and that was wasted in being surprised by the sudden action.

Which was why a moment later she found herself yelping in shock and pain when teeth sank into her shoulder with frightening strength. There was a worrying few moments spent trying to bash the thing loose, a fruitless attempt that served only to bring her more pain when her efforts threatened to tear the flesh inside the thing's mouth from her body. And in any case, there were more pressing issues.

Because almost as soon as the head completed its deadly arc Yuuki cried out in pain as the headless body of her Ashikabi ripped the claymore that had impaled her from the ground as if it weighed no more than a feather before whipping it around to cleave the fallen woman in two. There wasn't a second of hesitation as the body whirled around to attack the one that had wounded it, bringing its blade to bear against the struggling Sekirei .

She barely had any time to leap away from the blade, snarling in fury as she realized that she'd been forced into a retreat. She'd _never_ had to do that before against mere _humans_. It was a _disgrace_.

Which was probably why she spent the next few minutes meticulously dismembering the freakish abomination that had caused her such indignation.

She took great satisfaction in seeing the various bodyparts strewn across the ground, each one of the writhing uselessly in an effort to do whatever it was unkillable things did when they were cut to pieces.

"_Master!"_ A panicked voice cried out, and then Karasuba was staring hard at a perfectly recovered Yuuki. "Don't worry, I'll put you back together! I'll start with the legs!"

The Black Sekirei felt mildly affronted at this. After all, she'd seen the young woman impaled and then bisected by her own Ashikabi just a few moments ago.

"You died." Karasuba accused harshly, her eyes narrying. "I saw it."

"It didn't stick." Yuuki said distractedly. "Ack, is this the right or the left leg? It's kind of hard to tell..."

Karasuba promptly decided that there were better things to do than try and kill things that didn't have the common decency to stay dead, then turned and left the muttering Yuuki to try and reassemble her mangled master.


	3. Chapter 3

**The Adventures of Yuuki-Chan: The Unluckiest Sekirei!**

**Episode 3: Aliens, Magi and Vampires, Oh My! Sparkles Optional?**

"Ow."

The otherwise silently dim night of Shin-Tokyo was shattered by the sound of someone giving voice to their hurt, but there wasn't a whole lot of feeling to it. It was a resigned sort of exclamation, as if the most recent discomfort was nothing more than the most recent iteration of a long string of discomforts.

"Ow."

"Hold still, master!" The heroine of this story admonished before returning to her labours.

"Ow! Th't 'rt!" The voice come out as a sort of rasping wheeze of a whisper, full of gasps and awkward pauses. It sounded like a pained parody of speech, barely intelligible. It was the voice that came from a severed head, a combination of mangled vocal cords and a complete lack of lungs coming together in a vile conspiracy to deprive the speaker of its ability to talk. Luckily the speaker had experience with the situation, and had learned a few tricks to get around that particular problem. "Woo r'lly c'n't st'ch, c'n woo?"

"What?" Yuuki asked, pausing in her work once more.

"'Y s'd, woo r'll c'n't st'ch!"

"I can't understand you, master!" Yuuki complained

"H'l my h'd 'nt' my' sh'ld'r's!"

"Hold your head onto your shoulders?"

"'s!"

"Oh, okay."

Yuuki put down her tweezers and needle and picked up the scowling head of Damien Trask, an Ashikabi who may or may not have come from a strange land and learned the ancient and fabled ability to elude death through sheer force of will (and quite possibly a story that would make sense to just about nobody). She pressed it against his neck-stump, then patiently waited to hear what it was he was trying to say.

"Well?" she querried, curious to know what it was she'd missed.

The severed head of Damien took on one of intense concentration even as his body and neck tried to readjust themselves minutely to better align themselves together. It took s few moments, but eventually the strange foreigner shrugged and gave in tot he fact that he wouldn't be able to get things any better.

"I _said_," He began, and his voice came out a bit more raspy and wet than normal. This might have been due to the fact that his jugular artery had gotten blood all over the inside of his throat."'You really can't stitch, can you?'"

Yuuki looked affronted at this, and would have stormed away in a huff if she wasn't too busy holding her master together.

"Well I'm _sorry_ that I don't know how to stitch severed limbs back together, master!" She said instead, oozing sarcasm. "I must have fallen asleep through that 'impossible biology 101'-class they had me going to while I was at MBI."

Damien raised an eyebrow at this, honestly perplexed at the hostility his Sekirei was showing him.

"Is something wrong, Yuuki?" He queried, not sure what else he could do.

"Oh, _nothing's_ wrong, master!" The alien replied with a huff. "I mean, how could there be? My Ashikabi just got into a fight with the Black Sekirei and now he can't talk without help because he got cut up into tiny pieces! What could _possibly_ be wrong about that?"

"... Your what-now?" Damien said in confusion, before he managed to put two and two together. "Hold on, _I'm_ your Ashikabi? And what _is_ it, anyways?"

Yuuki stared down at the grisly ruin of her master before sighing in defeat. "I forgot to tell you about that part, didn't I?"

"Which part? I might have blanked out for a bit after you jumped me." Damien said casually, and a moment later a small blush appeared on his pale face. "It's not every day I get kissed into submission, after all."

Yuuki blushed furiously as she recalled their first meeting as well, though she quickly forced herself to stay on topic.

"That won't work on me right now, master!" She said with a note of warning. "You need to explain this! Humans aren't supposed to be able to do this sort of thing!"

"Ah, damn. I was hoping that you'd be too embarrassed thinking about kissing m-"

"_Master!_" Yuuki insisted, though her blush _did_ increase noticeably.

"Alright, alright, I suppose I do owe you an explanation." Damien acquiesced with a sigh. A thoughtful expression passed over his face, no doubt considering just where he should begin. Eventually he seemed to reach some kind of a consensus. "Okay, let's start this off simple: I'm a vampire."

"A vampire?" Yuuki repeated, completely dumbfounded. This didn't last, however, and soon she scrunched her face up into annoyance. "Master, how gullible do you think I am? There's no such thing as vampires."

"Yeah?" The foreigner answered dryly. "Say that to my face. My face that is on my severed head. I should think I know what I am by now, Yuuki-chan. I've been me for a few centuries, after all."

Yuuki stared hard at the severed head in her hands, not quite believing what it was telling her but not able to think of anything more plausible either.

"B, but I've _seen_ you out in the sunlight!"

"It just makes me very weak. Which isn't a very big change from the way I normally am, to be honest. Even among other vampires, I'm kind of a freak." He admitted. "I've got no special powers at all beyond the whole 'not dying' thing. Well, and that _other_ thing I can do, but I don't think I can really explain _that_ just yet."

"You don't drink blood!" Yuuki protested, desperately. Her life _couldn't_ be degenerating into some kind of horrible teenage girl-flick! She couldn't become a cliché so young in life!

"Nope. Three reasons for that, actually. One: I was once a human. Drinking human blood would really creep me out. Two: Blood is icky. Three: I'm a vegetarian."

"A vampiric vegetarian?" The sekirei sounded bewildered by the very notion. "I thought vampires needed blood to survive, though."

"We _do_." Damien agreed. "Mostly just to preserve our deteriorating genetic code and to maintain our powers. The longer we don't drink, the weaker and closer to death we become. _I'm_ a special case, though: I can't die, and I'm already pretty weak. So, I give the whole blood thing a pass."

"Vampires can change their shape!" Yuuki persisted.

"I like my shape." The vampire pointed out reproachfully. "And not all of us can. Just most of us. Besides, most of it is just a matter of magic."

"Magic is real?" Yuuki asked, giving up her futile attempts to rationalize the reality that was rapidly unfolding around her.

"Yeah, it is." Damien confirmed. "I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody in this whole Sekirei Plan thing is a magus. This sort of thing seems right up their alley."

"What sort of thing?"

"Pointless fighting and casual murder." He clarified. "I wonder if MBI has something to do with it. Hmm..."

"Master?"

"Huh, oh, yes Yuuki-chan?" Damien answered, snapped out of his musings. "Was there something else?"

"What does this have to do with you wanting to fight the Black Sekirei?" She demanded angrily. "You shouldn't have done that! Even if you _are_ a vampire, you shouldn't risk yourself like that!"

Damien stared hard at her for a long time, before giving her a radiant smile that would have put the midday sun to shame.

"Aww, were you _worried_ about me, Yuuki-chan?" He teased, ignoring the fierce blush that appeared on his sekirei's cheeks. "You really shouldn't. That old hag had about as much of _really_ hurting me as she did of finding a ladder long enough to reach the moon. Like you, death just rolls off me."

"But I _do_ die, master!" Yuuki protested. "I just get better!"

"Hmm, yes, there is that." Damien said, frowning slightly. "We'll have to fix that eventually."

"Fix? What do you mean 'fix'?" She asked, honestly curious. Did he know a way to make her powers less... useless?

"Well, you're kind of like me, aren't you? Death just doesn't stick. And that means that you become like me!"

"I can become a vampire?" Yuuki asked doubtfully.

"What? Oh, no no _no_. Who'd _want_ to become a vampire? It _sucks_. I mean, the only kind of humans you can hang out with without creeping them the hell out aren't really the kind you _want_ to hang out with, other vampires usually turn out to be assholes and there's _always_ someone out there who's trying to kill you. There's always the power you get from it, I suppose, but I kind of got screwed on that end of the deal, and I don't think you should risk having the same thing happen to you. If I had had a choice in the matter, I would never have become one."

"But, then why do you want me to become like you?"

Damien gave her a hurt look.

"I'm _more_ than a vampire, Yuuki-chan." He said reproachfully. "I've lived for over seven hundred years. There are things I've seen that you would scarcely believe."

"That's all very nice, but _why_ did you want to fight, master?" Yuuki asked, full of confusion. That someone might actually _want_ to risk their lives (or at least bodily damage,) was an alien notion to her.

But Damien gave a slow smile, full of teeth and eagerness but very little real happiness.

"Because I can change the world, Yuuki-chan." He told her, no doubt meaning to sound needlessly cryptic. "And I want to teach you how to as well."

"Teach me how to change the world?" Yuuki repeated, sounding doubtful. "What's that got to do with anything?"

Damien smile turned warm, and a moment later Yuuki yelped in surprise to find one of his dismembered arms wrapping itself around her in what might have been a comforting gesture if there had been a body connected to it.

"You had to see it for yourself, Yuuki-chan: in this world, there is no chance for people like us to win. We are weak, and they are strong. We can only survive, endure, and come a little closer to understanding the truth."

"What truth?"

Damien's warm smile went toothy and fierce at that.

"The truth that will allow you to change this illusion-world we live in, Yuuki-chan." He hinted, but didn't say anything else about it. "Now get back to stitching: we have to find someone who'd be willing to kill you a few more times for today."


	4. Chapter 4

**The Adventures of Yuuki-Chan: The Unluckiest Sekirei!**

**Episode 4: Yuuki-Chan And The Skeleton Forest! Part 1: Death Is Cheap!**

"Ah! Shirou-san! It's the zombie-Sekirei and the psycho-Ashikabi again!"

This was shouted by the ever-optimistic Musubi.

"I'm not a zombie/psycho!" Yuuki and Damien protested respectively at almost the exact same time.

Yes, once again our favourite martyr for personal amusement would be fighting with the ever-exuberant Musubi. For reasons unknown, however, the rest of Shirou's flock were absent. It was possibly related to Kusano's attempt at cooking causing a mild case of food poisoning with those who had carelessly ingested it without realizing she had made it without supervision.

Likewise, the woefully immortal pair of Damien and Yuuki were alone. The latter of which was suspiciously covered from almost head to toe, obscuring everything except his face. (Every now and again he chafed at his turtleneck, frowning deeply as he did.)

"They're the ones I told you about earlier, Shirou-san!"

The red haired young man seemed unfocussed, sniffing at the air with a deep frown on his lips. He looked as if he smelled something particularly bad, as if someone was holding rotting meat in front of his nose.

And he wouldn't have been very wrong.

But he turned his attention to his Sekirei when she spoke, letting none of his focus drop for a moment as he did.

"Hmm? The Ashikabi who kept killing his Sekirei?" He asked, sounding a bit doubtful. It was a bit far-fetched, really. In his experience, things died when you killed them. And while the Sekirei weren't exactly normal, he doubted that they were quite on par with the things that _didn't_ die when killed.

Yuuki suddenly perked up, remembering what the shrine maiden had said earlier.

"Wait, didn't that weird guy with the glasses ask us to beat up some guy named Shirou?" Yuuki asked, looking over at her Ashikabi.

Who, for his part, seemed to looking hard at Shirou with an intense look on his face. His normally cheerful features went from uncertain to unhappy and then to grim before he suddenly seemed to realize that he'd been spoken to.

"Huh, what?" He asked, sounding distracted.

"He's the one we're after, Master!" Yuuki repeated, sounding less excited as she realized that she would yet again be fighting with someone who would be using her face as a punching bag. "The guy with that bounty on him, remember?"

"Oh. Yeah, we should probably take care of that." He said half-heartedly, still frowning. "You distract balloon-chest over there, I'll take care of the boy."

Shirou frowned at the casual insult to his Sekirei, (who seemed more confused by the implications than offended,) and then reached behind him to pull Kanshou and Bakuya free from the 'package' he had been hiding them in.

Damien watched this with some surprise, studying the odd blades with a great deal of intensity. Then he grinned, and reached inside his coat and pulled forth a small dagger.

"I finally get to bring a knife to swordfight!" The strange man said with a quiet chuckle.

And then, without warning, he crossed the distance between them in a blur of motion that would have surprised a normal human being. Surprised, but not dominated. And Shirou was _far_ from normal.

At the first sign of danger he'd quietly Reinforced himself, steeling himself for an attack. After years of training with Saber and numerous excursions against hostile and quite often superior entities his reflexes were as sharp as a razor, which was more than could be said for Damien. The dagger-strike that the foreign Ashikabi had led with was turned aside with an easy parry from Kanshou even as Bakuya slashed at neck height, threatening to decapitate (again) in retaliation.

Shirou didn't count on his attacker losing his balance from being so quickly thwarted, however, and so Damien narrowly avoided having his head cut off yet again by instead crashing in a heap behind Shirou.

"Gah!" The strange man cried out as he crashed into the ground.

Shirou sighed internally, wishing not for the first time that people would just get the message about him: he was more than a few levels above everyone else. Only Sekirei would challenge him, and even then there was only a few that could hope for any kind of victory.

He just wished they would leave him alone.

Nearby, Yuuki and Musubi squared off yet again. Without her nunchaku or the claymore, (she'd managed to creatively misplace it in the Shin-Tokyo bay area,) Yuuki was treated once more to a world of pain. This time, since she was more experienced this sort of thing, she managed to do a bit better: she dodged the first few blows before a vicious right jab to her liver caused her to double over in pain and the following uppercut straight into her jaw sent her soaring upwards.

As if dictated by some malevolent director, she landed right on top of Damien, who had just begun to get back up for a second attempt at Shirou.

The two struggled against one another for a moment before managing to disentangle themselves from the other. (Yuuki was noticeably blushing when she finally emerged from the heap.)

"Ow," Damien grumbled as he rose, holding his left shoulder tentatively. "Watch where you're going, Yuuki-chan. I think I tore some of my stitches when you fell on me."

"T, tell her to, master!" Yuuki complained, still blushing intensely. "She's the one who hit me!"

"Ah! Sorry, psycho-Ashikabi-san!" The bouncy young Sekirei apologized earnestly. "Musubi didn't mean to hurt you!"

"Aw, don't worry about it, err, Musubi-chan?" The vampire assured uncertainly, obviously unused to being apologized to after being hurt. "I'll heal eventual-"

_-Slorp!-_

The sound of Damien's arm tearing loose from his shoulder and flopping onto the ground wetly caused everyone to look down at the dismembered limb with varying degrees of horror, surprise and annoyance.

Shirou was certain that the battle was done then and there, (because _really_, once your arms start falling off it was time to stop fighting,) and was prepared to let the strange duo make the necessary arrangements to get the one-armed man to the ER.

He was instead surprised when the man calmly bent over and picked up his dismembered limb and inspected the wound speculatively. Then he turned to level his Sekirei with a deep frown.

"I am going to teach you how to stitch _properly_ when we get done here, Yuuki!" He berated, sounding more irritated that one of his arms had fallen off than worried. He waved the severed arm at her for emphasis. "You did a _terrible_ job!"

"I've never done that sort of thing before, Master!" Yuuki complained. "Besides, I don't think you should be fighting so soon after being dismembered!"

"Aah!" Musubi cried out, taking a few horrified steps backwards even as she pointed an accusatory finger at the strange man. "Psycho-Ashikabi-san is a zombie! That's how zombie-Sekirei-chan got zombified!"

"I'm not a zombie!" Both Yuuki and Damien shouted, though the protest was undermined somewhat as the latter waved his arms around wildly. The effect was womewhat unnerving considering that he was still holding on to one of them.

Shirou, for his part, took all this in with a mere rising of an eyebrow before realization sank in. The stink of rot and putrescence now made sense to him: they were coming from this creature. It was strange, though. He'd never come across a kind of magic that smelt so _bad_ before. Rotting flesh was not something he usually acquainted with magic.

"Apostle." He growled out, causing the vampire to perk up.

"Apostle?" Damien said slowly, his voice full of disgust. "Don't compare me to those monsters. Just vampire will do, thank you."

"What's the difference?" Shirou asked with a snort. "Your kind is only interested in preying on the weak."

The vampire blinked at that, and then a slow sneer appeared on his lips.

"Boy, you have no idea just how _wrong_ you are." He growled out, then began the slow, difficult process of freeing himself from his shirt with only one hand.

Doing so revealed an intricate network of crisscrossing stitches that ran all across his chest, a thousand stabs and slashes courtesy of the Black Sekirei, as well as the bloody stump of his shoulder.

"I have no interest in humans." He hissed, reattaching his arm carefully. The skin sizzled and smoked as he did, and soon the area was filled with the stink of burning flesh. "Least of all their blood. It's left me weak and dying, but I learned long ago that the benefits of blood are _not_ worth the trouble that comes with it. I'll leave it to you magi to tamper with."

"Enough." Shirou said resolutely, and brought Bakuya and Kanshou back up in preparation. "Even if I believed you, and I don't, you're still a danger to this city."

Damien flexed his reattached arm speculatively, then bent over to retrieve his dagger.

"What a coincidence," He said, suddenly full of cheerfulness. "I was just thinking the same thing about you." He smiled brightly, and held his small blade in front of him. "Let's let the last man standing decide who was right, ne?"

Without further hesitation the two leaped at one another, neither one speaking a word or crying out. The two Sekirei present merely watched in confused wonder as the two more-than-mundane entities clashed.

It soon became clear that it was a one-sided fight.

"Go Shirou-san!" Musubi called out cheerfully. "Beat that zombie and free Yuuki-chan!"

"Master!" Yuuki cried out in concern, completely ignoring the young woman to her side. "Don't let him hurt you! You need to teach me how to stitch, remember?"

Damien dodged, weaved, and even at one point threw himself to the ground just to avoid Shirou's deadly onslaught, but in the end he simply wasn't a match for the magus. After fighting countless battles against Heroic Spirits, apostles and many other unearthly creatures, what hope did a failure of an apostle stand?

But the vampire gave a spirited fight nonetheless, fighting tooth and nail right up until the end. The tiny blade in his hands, already showing deep cracks where it had parried the legendary weapons, shattered in his grasp when he brought it up to block a sideways slash from Kanshou and soon after the noble phantasm bit deep into his chest, slicing through ribs and internal organs like so much butter before becoming lodged inside his chest.

"_Master!"_ Yuuki screamed, horrified at seeing her master so badly wounded.

Shirou felt sorry for the Sekirei for the terrible misfortune that had befallen her when she had Reacted to an Apostle. But he couldn't afford to be distracted, not now. Not when his seemingly fatal blow seemed to have done _nothing_ to it than make it look down in confusion.

"A-Ahaha!" The thing chuckled weakly, (having your lung pierced by a sword can do that to you,) a manic grin twisting itself into existence on its mouth. "Don't worry about me, Yuuki-chan!" He reassured brightly. "I only look human!"

The wounded monster let the ruined weapon in his hand drop to the ground as he brought both his hands down to rest on the flat of the blade of Kanshou. Shirou tried to twist the sword, to force it free, but the grip that Damien had on it was irresistible.

"What magnificent weapons you have there, human." Damien rasped, his hands forcing the blade out of his torso with a sickening fleshy squelchas his insides shifted in ways nature had not intended. "To so easy hurt me... I didn't think I'd ever get to see something so wondrous. Where did you get them?"

"An old enemy gave them to me." Shirou answered simply, unwilling to explain further.

"Ahh, you're one of _those_ kinds of magi, huh? I imagine your 'old enemy' was only _too_ happy to give them up to you after you'd stopped carving him up into thin strips." The vampire sneered. "But unluckily for _you_, I can't have a magus interfering in my plans for the Sekirei. They're far too marvellous for you people to exterminate after you're done prying every secret from their dead bodies."

Shirou didn't bother correcting him, or protesting the gross assumption.

"You don't scare me, apostle." He instead said with a sneer. "I've killed enough of your kind to get good at it."

Damien frowned, then seemed to realize something. His lips curled upward into a feral grin, full of teeth and malice.

"I bet you have." The vampire acquiesced lightly, and straightened himself to stand proudly in spite of the pain it caused him to do so. "Unfortunately for you, killing me just slows me down. Yuuki-chan!"

"Master?" The Sekirei answered uncertainly, turning away from her opponent. (Who seemed equally transfixed by what was going on.)

"Watch carefully." The foreign Ashikabi instructed with a kind tone. "I'm going to change the world."

Shirou frowned at this, but seeing no threat he merely waited for whatever it was the creature wanted to show his Sekirei before he died. Not because he was curious, but because he seemed to honestly _care_ for the creature that had been bound to him. For that alone, Shirou could allow some small amount of mercy. After all, what could it do to him? It had all but admitted that it had none of the powers of an apostle, and all of the drawbacks.

The vampire spoke in the dull tones that Shirou recognized as an Aria. A spell? It had said that it had no Magical Circuits. What could it possibly hope to achieve.

"I'm going to show you all my years of life. What I've learned from dying thousands upon thousands of times. What the despair of watching the few friends I've made in all of those lives whither and _die_ when they were not brutally cut down before their time has done to me. What the hatred of seeing my children murdered time and time again by those who hunt me has wrought." The foreigner paused in his tirade, just long enough to cough up blood into his own hands, then collapse as he apparently lost the strength to force himself upright. Almost getting cut in half can do that to you.

But even in his weakened position, he continued.

"I, I'll show you the world as I've come to see it, Yuuki-chan. The world as it _really_ is. This park, this city, this _world_, it's all an illusion. This park is a wasteland, this city is a graveyard and this world is a **Bone Orchard**."

The words that left the creature's mouth came out warped and twisted, as if spoken by some great demonic beast of an unknowable abyss. They were deep, they were sibilant, but most of all they were creepy as all get-out.

But Shirou immediately recognized it for what it was: the creature in front of him had just manifested a reality marble, imposing his own internal world upon his surroundings. But unlike the fire that burned away reality like his own did, there was only a fast wave of darkness that seemed to drain all colour from their surroundings, leaving only a barren, dichotomised nightmare of a landscape.

The ground beneath their feet had changed from a sullen green and brown to a stark bone-white, while the sky had changed to a perfect blackness that seemed to go on into infinity. In all directions, there was nothing. Shapes, human and otherwise, became mere silhouettes and basic outlines where shade and light should be.

The world that Damien was expressing was a featureless wasteland, devoid of any signs of life save those he had brought with him and the trees. And it was those sole deviations from the vast nothingness that surrounded them that turned the realm into a nightmare.

As previously noted, the park in which Yuuki and Damien had elected to wait for someone to find them hadn't been a very pretty place, but there _had_ been a few trees trying to ecce out an existence in a city that had no place for them. Inside this realm, they had vanished, replaced instead by sinister simulacra.

Where there had once been thin, unhealthy trunks there were now twisting, bleached-white spinal cords that pierced into a bleak, starless night sky. Branches that reached skywards were replaced bony limbs and hands, swaying and billowing in a spectral wind. Black blood flowed like sap from each joint or segment of those skeletal trees, dripping and pooling around at the base of their trunks before draining into the ground.

And hanging from each sturdy limb was a skeleton or rotting carcass, the ropes that held them aloft groaning quietly as they gently swayed from side to side. Their dead gaze seemed to glare accusingly at them all, as if resenting their vitality.

Which, considering where they were, was entirely possible.

"Wh, what is this?" The apostle's Sekirei gasped in horror. "What happened? Master?"

"I _told_ you, Yuuki-chan." Damien Trask said warmly. "I changed the world. Just a little piece, and it won't last, but for now we can see things as they truly are."

"You think _this_ is what the world is like?" Yuuki shrieked, horrified at what she was seeing.

"Of course not, Yuuki-chan." The Ashikabi chided lightly. "I _know_ this is what the world is like. And one day, you will too."

Yuuki looked as though the thought made her sick.

"Musubi doesn't like it here..." The normally enthusiastic Sekirei said uncertainly, her guard lowering as the dismal landscape. "It's too dark."

Shirou, on the other hand, was less than impressed.

"Is this it?" He asked rhetorically. "A bit unnerving, but nothing that I cannot deal with."

"Heh," Damien said, grinning wilding. "You have no idea how many people have said that to me. You people think _nothing_ of killing people like us, of destroying that which poses you little harm."

He approached one of those grisly trees, and laid a hand against the trunk. The world groaned and shook a moment later, each and every skeletal tree beginning to writhe, bony hands opening and closing while the titanic spines twisted and flexed.

"You people never consider the consequences of your mindless destruction." Damien said with a sneer.

Without warning he pulled a fist back and then smashed it against the trunk, smashing his hand deep inside. His whole body writhed for just a moment, and then he tore his hand free with a shower of bone shards while at the same whirling to face Shirou. In the hand he had jammed into the strange tree there was... _something_.

It looked like a strange mix of a bone and a dagger, as if someone had taken a femur and carefully carved one end of it into a blade. But that was merely the physical shape of it. There was something about the weapon that conveyed some kind of… otherness. It didn't trigger the instant recognition of his own reality marble, though he wondered if his position in someone else's manifested reality had something to do with it. Was it possible to retain one's own reality marble inside of someone else's? An internal word _within_ an internal world? It seemed like a reasonable enough prospect, and he would have assumed as much if not for the fact that he had no idea what that strange dagger was.

Damien flung the weapon as he spun, then turned back to the tree and reached in yet again.

Shirou slapped the dagger away with Kanshou, more annoyed with the assault than threatened.

- And was extreme surprised when a moment later the weapon began to crumble, the od of its existence vanishing like morning mist under a hot sun. There had been no warning: in one moment he had swatted the dagger away, in the next his weapon was dissipating.

He had a second to ponder what had happened before he was forced to dodge away from yet another of those strange weapons, not wanting to find out first-hand just what they had done to instantly destroy a Noble Phantasm, even an imitated one. But he wasted no time in using one of the few magics available to him to divine the mystery of his enemy.

"Structure Analysis." He intoned quickly, narrowing his eyes on the weapon. And then he flinched away, clutching at his head.

Death.

That was what the weapon was made of. Not the crude matter of its physical being, but rather the concept that gave the weapon meaning. Looking at that weapon, really _looking_ at it, painted a grisly picture in his mind.

_- He looked up into deep red eyes, a face as pale as ivory framed by golden hair. There was no compassion in that face, no pity. It was clear what that woman thought of him: he was __less__ than nothing to her, a diversion at best._

_It wasn't fair: he'd just been __gotten__ into the sleepy little town of Misaki and now some crazy super-vampire-woman was bisecting him with nothing more than an incredibly powerful roundhouse to his stomach. Who __did__ that to someone without even trying to talk to them first? It was ridiculous._

_And now it would take him __months__ to get his spine back to the way it had been, let alone trying to get his internal organs back into a semblance of normalcy. Sometimes it really sucked to be immortal. –_

That death, that painful, agonizing fate was what waited for him if he was struck by that blade. It would pass from the dagger into him, and he would die.

Each of those daggers was a death, the realization that the one who had made it had given it a death. The dagger didn't impart the concept of death to whatever it touched, but an actual, tangible death. The dagger was merely a vessel: it created a point in which death could be placed in the victim, and it was in that place that the death of the one who had borne it found a home.

It wasn't enough to say that it contained the concept of death. It _was_ death: the second in which the life of its creator was snuffed out, the fatal weakness that stole every ounce of strength, the creeping cold as flesh began to lose its heat and the deep darkness that crawled in from the edges of vision as the last breath is drawn. The exact moment in which the flame of life was snuffed out. The dagger was the crystallization, the pure and unrefined _reality_ of death.

If something could die, then all that dagger had to do to kill it was stab it. It wouldn't matter where, or how deeply: the death would already be there, spreading like a poison through the victim's existence.

"Ah, I can see you've figured it out." The vampire said, nodding smugly. He spread his arms wide, gesturing to the trees around him and their skeletal boughs seemed to writhe at his movement. "This world is built on death: _my_ death. Each time someone thoughtlessly killed me, that death went here. And each time, this world became _stronger_. The difference between life and death hardly even matter anymore, now. All it takes is just a little nudge to move from one to the other."

He held out a fresh dagger in his hand, beaming a radiant smile.

"How do you like the world you helped create, human?" He asked rhetorically, then threw himself forward at Shirou in a headlong sprint.

Shirou dodged away from the oncoming blade, taking care that he didn't touch it in a way that could in any way be construed as cutting him. His unique ability, while mostly useless in this place, told him just how _bad_ an idea letting that dagger cut him would be.

Just as Unlimited Blade Works was the natural antitheses of the Gates of Babylon, it seemed that Bone Orchard was the antitheses of Unlimited Blade Words. To be sure, he _could_ recreate the blade. But only the shell, the husk of it: the component that gave the weapon it's strength, it's killing power, was the death of its creator. No amount of prana could duplicate that. To remake that blade, he would have to die. The second he tried to imbue it with its Concept, he would die. That was the only way to give it its power.

He twisted away from the deadly weapon, not wanting to waste his remaining weapon uselessly. Instead, he lashed out with his free hand with all of his Reinforced strength. He was immensely gratified to hear and feel the crunch-crackle of breaking bones even as the vampire gasped in pain and was thrown away.

"Master!" Yuuki cried out, and finally managed to find the presence of mind to move. She ran swiftly to her Ashikabi's side, kneeling down next to him defensively even as she glared angrily at Shirou. "No more! Let's just run away. You can't take much more before, before..."

She didn't say it, but her implication was obvious.

The vampire gave a dark bubble, and the wheezing bubble that accompanied it as blood seeped into his lungs lent the laughter a deeply troubling note.

"I _told_ you, Yuuki-chan." He said comfortingly, smiling encouragingly. "I _can't_ die. Certainly not here."

This didn't seem to be enough to console her, however.

"That doesn't matter!" She protested, shaking her Ashikabi gently. "He's _hurting_ you, master! And I don't like this place. Let's just _leave_."

The foreign Ashikabi held his increasingly worried Sekirei close to him, then released her and pushed himself up to his feet. The alien stayed where she was, staring down at the ground.

"I didn't bring us here simply for the fun of it, Yuuki." Damien told her. "You had to see this for yourself."

The he turned his head to glare at Shirou, hate plain on his face.

"You have to see what it means to die."


End file.
